Maren Morris Pleads With America, and 8 More New Songs – The New York Times

Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.

Maren Morris, ‘Better Than We Found It’

If a country music fan watches Maren Morris’s entire video for her new song, “Better Than We Found It,” here is what that person would absorb:

• The story of two young Mexican boys, beneficiaries of the Dream Act, soon to return to Mexico

• Footage of Black Lives Matter protests

• The uncle of Daniel Hambrick, shot and killed by Nashville police in 2018, striking a shooting stance and painfully re-enacting the moment: “Pow, pow, pow pow”

Morris doesn’t push as directly in the song itself — listen casually and it could be the kind of paean to faith and neighborliness and good acts that might, in simpler times, come out of the mouth of any of Morris’s Nashville peers. But her references to xenophobes, to being told to stay silent about politics, and to blue-clad wolves knocking at doors are crisp and striking, and her willingness to state the obvious is, in this spoiled moment, a form of bravery:

America, America, divided we fall
America, America, God save us all
From ourselves and the hell that we built for our kids
America, America, we’re better than this

JON CARAMANICA

Halsey, ‘I’m Not Mad’

After the breakup cools, clarity arrives. Halsey captures this vividly and sneeringly on “I’m Not Mad,” from the deluxe edition of her recent album “Manic.” The chorus is optimistic — it focuses on how she’s moved on. But in the verses, she’s still looking in the rearview, her eyes narrowed into a seething glare: “I hope your little brother turns out/To be nothing like you.” CARAMANICA

Jorja Smith featuring Popcaan, ‘Come Over’

“I don’t know if you want me to come over,” the British R&B singer Jorja Smith ponders in this exploration of a relationship’s communications gap. “I wish I could read your mind.” Meanwhile, the Jamaican singer-rapper Popcaan complains, “I call for you girl, but you don’t answer me.” The beat is a semi-submerged variant of dancehall; the situation is all too common. JON PARELES

Priya Ragu, ‘Good Love 2.0’

Priya Ragu is Swiss; her parents are Tamils from Sri Lanka. The first half of “Good Love 2.0,” like most of her recordings, is steeped in the cushy keyboard chords and short phrases of 1990s R&B as she switches between singing and rapping. But two minutes in, everything changes and convention disappears. South Asian drumming pushing threes against twos, and swirling electronic loops and male and female voices, in different modes, summon the East-West hybrid she promises at her best. PARELES

Jonsi featuring Robyn, ‘Salt Licorice’

Few could have predicted this collaboration: Jonsi, who led the sweepingly cinematic band Sigur Ros, working with the dance-crying auteur Robyn and the brittle, glitch-loving, meta-pop producer A.G. Cook. It’s legato vs. staccato, contemplation vs. dance, physicality and breath vs. programming. Upbeat and second-by-second changeable, the track feels like a collision of sensibilities and time frames: “You’re a heartbreaker, olé!’” But it also strikes sparks. PARELES

21 Savage and Metro Boomin’, ‘No Opp Left Behind’

From the moody, sinister collaborative album “Savage Mode II” — a sequel to the original “Savage Mode,” from 2016 — comes “No Opp Left Behind,” a prime example of 21 Savage’s plain-spoken grimness and Metro Boomin’s theatrical bounce. CARAMANICA

Dayna Stephens, ‘Tarifa’

Try not to be overwhelmed by the low-key exchange that opens “Tarifa,” from the saxophonist Dayna Stephens’s new album, “Right Now! Live at the Village Vanguard.” Until a few months ago, it was commonplace: Ben Street opens with a few notes of the tune’s syncopated bass line, and Stephens utters an affirmation, as if saying, “My heart heard that!” Feeling invited, the crowd calls back with a ripple of laughter. Street’s kick-stepping line locks in with the restrained piano accompaniment of Aaron Parks and the drummer Greg Hutchinson’s Mediterranean-accented pattern. Stephens’s soprano saxophone carries the incantatory, airborne melody, which he wrote in a fit of inspiration after traveling to a Spanish town that overlooks Morocco. The performance never tips into melodrama or open display, but you can feel the band becoming a collective engine, at once clearing and cluttering Stephens’s path, drawing the listeners into the equation. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

Omar Apollo, ‘Dos Uno Nueve (219)’

Area code 219 covers northwestern Indiana, where Omar Apollo was born and grew up. He has built his audience with long-breathed R&B songs. He is also Mexican-American, and he often slips some Spanish lyrics into his R&B. In “Dos Uno Nueve (219)” he switches to the traditional Mexican music he grew up hearing: a corrido, a lilting waltz backed by bass and filigreed, improvisational guitars. He sings about being a self-made success against the odds, and about earning his expensive wardrobe; a few spoken words provide hip-hop swagger and profanity. But it’s a surprisingly old-school corrido — no electronics, no drums. PARELES

Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, ‘Oakanda Spoonful’

Burnt Sugar isn’t the best-known band to emerge from the Black Rock Coalition — a group of (mostly) musicians that came together in the 1980s to blast back against the whitewashing of rock, punk, Sun Ra’s legacy, and anything related to free jazz or guitars or the New York underground — but it has become the collective’s flagship. Loosely led by the game-changing critic and musician Greg Tate, Burnt Sugar’s snaky, acid-blasted sound collages have the multidimensional abundance of an assemblage, and the tangled narrative of a surrealist text. It makes a nice kind of sense that this track — its title refers to the reclamation of Oakland as a historical site of Black resistance — would be prominently featured on the first release from Burning Ambulance, a new record label created by the artist I.A. Freeman and the writer Phil Freeman, who as a critic seeks to uncover the missed connections and social imperatives running through the vast territory of improvised music today. RUSSONELLO